Thomas Friedman Suck On This

I just don’t understand why the New York Times keeps paying this gasbag. Here he writes about how Major Hasan fell for “The Narrative” some Muslim propaganda on how the US has meant to destroy Islam or something:

Here’s my take: Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by “The Narrative.”

What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.

Huh… I wonder. Where would jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books get this idea that American-Crusader-Zionists were part of a conspiracy to keep Muslims down… I wonder… oh yeah…

FRIEDMAN: You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society. You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this, ok. That Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.

More apt than Freidman would have been any number of the Bush administration applying mideval Crusade rhetoric to the war in Iraq.

If you read, Friedman’s column and his prior comments together, however, I think what he is saying now is that we are heading into another “terrorist bubble” because we are doing nothing to combat the fundamentalist narrative of the Muslim world. Much like our next financial bubble, since we refuse to regulate investment banking.

We are losing the war of ideas, because we chose war as our means of communication and we are the ones that get to s**k on that now.

I really enjoy the enthusiasm of Toms writing and thinking, but it’s often way off and way too emotional. His way of making “bubbles” out of everything is amuzing. Guess his brain works that way – sorting information in bubbles.

What I am saying is that I don’t think that Thomas Friedman gets it. He is someone who supposedly knows the Middle East fairly well, as he travels a lot around the world, but alas he still can’t get past his origins, which are to believe in the Samuel Huntington Clash of Civilizations self-fulfilling crap. He simply cannot see from the viewpoint of the Arab world, as Stephen Walt shows, that Americans kill far more Muslims than Muslims kill Americans. Thus the “Narrative” that Americans are out to destroy Muslims has fairly solid backing. We’ve invaded Afghanistan. We’ve invaded Iraq. We’re threatening to invade Iran. We bomb Pakistan. We bomb Yemen. We bomb Somalia. We provide Israel with all their modern weaponry that they use to bomb Palestinians, Gazans, and Lebanese. Why would anyone think other than America likes killing Muslims?